Colin would look after everyone, Stephen reminded himself. Colin was no slouch in a fight and not half bad with magic, either, dilettante though he was. He certainly wouldn’t make trouble for the staff. Baldwin and his wife knew him of old, and as for the others, Colin had always been rather engaging.

Half the dairymaids at Loch Arach had been in love with him by the time he was eighteen, in fact, and more than a few of the farmers’ daughters.

That was Loch Arach, of course. London girls were more sophisticated and far more cynical. Neither Polly nor Emily seemed the type to moon about after a gentleman, no matter how charming, and Mina—well, no. Mina had a mind like a scalpel and the will of a particularly stubborn mule. Colin would stand no chance with her.

Certainly not.

The possibility wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Twenty-seven

Dragons, Mina was rapidly learning, could be as boring as anyone else.

She was a quarter of the way into the journal she was reading, was reasonably sure that the author was a dragon—he made frequent mentions of “transformation” and of flying—and had spent half her time almost pinching herself to stay awake. The man had done half of his estate records in his journal, for one thing, and had also apparently had very decided opinions about his nearest neighbor.

In between sheep and hounds, Mina had found a few interesting bits: a paragraph about what seemed very coldly cordial relations with the “Great Ones of the East” (or, the way he spelled it, “ye Great Ones of the Eaft”) and a mention of sending his priest to “settle” a haunted house.

Like half-buried gems, those few sentences kept her digging.

Eleanor arrived today from France,

the latest entry began,

and brought with her the children, who are growing well. She wishes to add to their number, and I have no objection, but I would wait a while before the rite, so as to ensure that our youngest may be born in the spring. Meanwhile, as I’ve observed before, it does no harm to practice the mortal portion of the marital act.

Mina stared.

The writing, though old, was very proper. The author hadn’t yet in her reading been vulgar or even profane, which had come as a bit of a surprise to Mina in the first place. Just when she’d gotten used to a nobleman apparently fitting the image of the kindly and proper lord in children’s books, he was writing about the “marital act,” which apparently had extra aspects if you were a dragon and wanted to achieve the traditional result.

She knew that a number of human rituals concerned themselves with that part of life. She’d read a few books she wasn’t supposed to read, and she’d typed a few pages of notes that Professor Carter had harrumphingly warned her about beforehand. From a scholarly perspective, mentions of “the rite” were quite interesting and not at all surprising.

What the journal writer meant, unless Mina was very wrong, was that if a dragon-man and a human simply had a bit of fun—as they might have said back home when they were being polite—then the lady wouldn’t end up in a fix for it. At least, that seemed to be the case.

For example, if she and Stephen—

Of course, that was when the door opened.

Mina was up from her seat before she knew what she was doing, putting her back to the wall and wishing she had a better weapon than a fountain pen.

“Easy, lass,” said Colin MacAlasdair, laughing and leaning against the doorway. “I promise I’ve not come to muck up your filing, nor yet to steal a book.”

“They’re your books,” said Mina. She dropped the letter opener back on her desk. “I’m sorry. I’m a bundle of nerves today, it seems.”

“Spending as long as you have here, I’m surprised you’ve not tried to kill anyone yet. Though I’d prefer it not be me you target when your mind does snap. You’d break the hearts of so many women.”

“God forbid,” said Mina. On a whim, she closed the book and handed it over to Colin. “Do you know who might’ve written this? Stephen didn’t, but—”

A second too late to catch herself, she heard Stephen’s Christian name come from her lips. Done was done; flinching or correcting herself would only call more attention to what she’d said.

“He’s foisted himself on fewer of our relatives than I have,” Colin said, as if he’d heard nothing out of the usual. After a few minutes flipping through the book, he laughed and shook his head.

“You don’t know?”

“Oh, I do. I was just feeling sorry for you reading it,” said Colin, “and a bit for my cousins, living with the man. It’s my Uncle Georgie, and a man more fond of speeches you never met. Though he was a good sort, at that.”

Mina glanced out past the door and saw that the hallway was empty. “A dragon named George?” she asked, keeping her voice quiet despite the immediate lack of witnesses. “Your family likes irony, doesn’t it?”

“As it happens,” said Colin, shutting the door, “the legend’s gotten it a bit twisted. Which is just as well for us, really.”

“Oh?”

Ignoring the several perfectly good chairs around the room, Colin perched on the windowsill like an overgrown schoolboy. “From time to time,” he said, “one of us gets stuck, ye ken. The oldest ones didn’t, from everything I can tell, but the oldest ones were free from all sorts of difficulties that we have now.”

“Like, ah, continuing the line?” Mina asked. She gestured at the journal. “He mentions a, um, rite.”

She looked away from Colin’s face as she spoke, lest he see too much interest in hers and connect it to his brother, but his reply came easily and casually. “Aye—it’s why we’ve not outnumbered you mortals, living as long as we do. Something about being neither truly mortal nor truly not. We’re somewhere in between, like—”

“—a stuck window?”

Colin laughed. “That’ll do, though it’ll never make a poem. At any rate, the same thing goes for changing form. Sometimes we get trapped in one shape or another. When it’s man shape, there’s no worry in it, save that the man sometimes misses dragon’s form. When one of us loses himself—or herself—in the dragon, though, that’s a worry.”

“For more than being conspicuous?”

“So I hear. It’s not happened any time in my day, but…” From the windowsill, Colin eyed her for a minute, considering whether to go on. “The thing about…beings that aren’t human…is that most of them aren’t people.”

“I’d rather assumed that,” said Mina.

Colin shook his head. “No, I mean they’re not just men in funny suits. They see the world differently. They see humans differently. You’ve grown into certain sentiments that I don’t have, but I’m far more human than the…Elder Folk, let’s call them. Not all of them see human beings as prey, mind—Stephen and I wouldn’t be here otherwise—but when a dragon goes mean, it goes very mean very quickly. And a man stuck in dragon shape can slide almost as fast.”

In dragon form, Stephen had been about five times Mina’s size. She remembered flaming eyes and teeth like razors. “What happens then? When someone does get trapped?”

“Depends on how it happens, I’d think,” said Colin. “I’ve heard that some of them go away to live…elsewhere…and I suppose they do well enough at it. There’s more society than the human sort, after all, if you know how to find it. But if they become a danger to others, then the rest of us generally see to the matter.”

“And that was Saint George,” said Mina, a little faintly. Part of her was still trying to deal with elsewhere.

“That was Saint George,” Colin agreed. “Not actually my uncle. The name’s been passed down, you understand. The name of the one he killed…hasn’t.”

“Seems like hard luck for him.”

“It might have been. Stories say he’d been an unpleasant sort even before the change. But then, we’d say that afterward, regardless. We’re not completely immune to certain human tendencies, after all, and one of them is rewriting history.”

Colin didn’t really look anything other than human, not then. Lounging in the faint sunlight, wearing a gray tweed suit that probably had cost more than Mina earned in two years, he could have been any idle young man about town. Stephen gave off a much greater feeling of power. Certainly he was the less forthcoming of the two.

Despite those considerations—or perhaps because of them—Colin’s presence was much less comfortable. Mina couldn’t imagine talking to this man over breakfast, and not just because she’d never seen him there. She certainly couldn’t imagine trying to reassure him when he felt guilty.

Kissing him was completely out of the question. Mina would as soon have tried to hug the tiger at the zoo.

“You said I’ve got certain sentiments that you don’t,” she said.

“It’s a bit of an assumption, I admit,” said Colin, “but yes. We all grow up with a set of rules, aye? And even if you break them,” he went on, with an arch smile that said he had some experience with that idea, “you still know you’re crossing a line and you might have to pay for it later. Your rules are different than mine. So are your consequences. When you can’t just outlive your enemies—or your friends—it gives you a different perspective on the straight and narrow.”

Mina took a deep breath. “And Stephen’s perspective is like yours?”

“Oh, in some ways. But he’s always known he was to be the next master of Loch Arach—our lands back home. That makes a difference too. An heir isn’t an entirely separate species from his younger brother, perhaps, but then, neither are my people an entirely separate species from human beings.”